Himalayan Pilgrimage : A Visionary Journey by Jo Carson

In 1971 a photo of a snow covered Buddhist chorten inspired me to spend three months making a documentary of village life in the world's highest mountains. I was 21, idealistic, somewhat fearless, and a film student at UCLA. Seeing that distant holy place felt like a personal challenge. My friends Ward Sellers and Alan Wald were traveling toward India, so I proposed to meet them there and go north to make a film.

To prepare, I worked three jobs and alternated between jogging and swimming each day. Loaded with 66 lbs of gear, I set out alone, counting on snail mail to find my friends. The war between India and Pakistan was on, leading to missing flights and a scary air raid experience. Finally I managed to connect with Ward and Alan in New Delhi. Tibet was closed to all travelers, so we limited our plans to Nepal. When we did arrive in Nepal, the people were warm and welcoming.

A few days later we flew from colorful Katmandu 80 miles west to the farming village of Pokhara. Asking around, we located an English author whom we had contacted by letter. He helped us find two porters and a young Tibetan, Tom Ting, to translate. With gear loaded, the five of us trekked for a month in the north west of Nepal. I immediately got a bad GI bug for two days, and this was in the middle of a drenching storm. Leeches were suddenly appearing everywhere, including between my toes. Our tent weathered all this better than I did. When the clouds cleared we could see around us the incredibly green, verdant village of Biratante. We started filming immediately.

The rest of our journey, with pictures and sketches, is here:
bit.ly/2F1m9vC

My goal was to bring home a vision of the beauty and spiritual feeling of the Nepali people and mountains. The film has unusual visual textures; I was a graphic artist before studying film, and was much influenced by experimental films of the era. Himalayan Pilgrimage has a lot of "stop-motion" shooting techniques. Later I used optical printing to stretch out the more poetic shots. I wanted to reveal many facets of this vibrant culture without an authoritative white male voice-over, although that was the absolute norm for documentaries at the time.
The video copy shown here has been transferred many times; some day I hope to salvage the original film and get a new, high resolution transfer. When I premiered the 16mm film on UCLA's huge Melnitz Hall screen, the experience was breathtaking. It was selected for the early film festival, LA FILMEX, and won several awards at other festivals over the next few years. © 1972 Jo Carson